teacher’s pattern was to demonstrate—from julienne to chiffonade—then have a student take his place at the cutting board and attempt to imitate. I held back at first, curious to see how much experience my new classmates had. Even under close supervision, blood was drawn. The kitchen, we quickly learned, was no place for the clumsy or distracted.
After a brief demonstration of how to cut a classic batonnet—a squared-off oversize matchstick—a kid named Martin got a turn at the chopping board. The teacher handed over his knife, and Martin said nothing. He just took the knife and, in one fluid motion, topped and tailed the potato, cutting off the rounded ends and edges so that he had a rectangular block. He sliced the block into quarter-inch-thick slabs, then stacked the slabs in piles of three and sliced them again, lengthwise.
The group fell silent, admiring the perfectly uniform pile of potato sticks. Martin took a towel from a peg below the counter and wiped down the knife blade.
“Did everybody see that?” our teacher asked.
My grandmother had been such a thorough and patient teacher that I came into school with basic techniques, far beyond most of the kids in my class. I knew how to hold a knife. I knew how to fillet a fish.I knew how to sauté meat in a cast iron pan over high heat to produce a nice crust. But I could see in that mound of potatoes that Martin knew everything I knew, and more. Cooking was incorporated into his body like pure muscle memory, the same way I dribbled a soccer ball, the way the rest of us walked and breathed. From that day on, as I saw it, there were only two students in the entire school—me and Martin. He was the one to beat and I was the one to do it.
One of our instructors was a young Brit named John Morris. His job was to teach us how to grill, fry, sauté, and poach, all using French techniques and terminology, of course. Unlike most of our other teachers, he insisted we call him Chef John, as if we were in a professional kitchen. Chef John spoke in Swenglish, starting each class in polite Swedish and gradually slipping, as the day ground on, into a string of English curse words. He’d started off in his hometown pub, cleaning chickens and cooking liver. Then he moved to London and worked in the kitchen of the opulent Dorchester hotel, where he was promoted to
chef de partie
and cooked for the likes of Queen Elizabeth and Jimmy Carter. If he hadn’t met a Swedish girl in a bar, he said, he’d still be there. But that girl had become his wife, and love had led him to Gburg.
Chef John did not have an easy task. Try demonstrating the difference between simmering and poaching on an old government-issue stove whose gas line delivered its fuel in uneven hiccups. In a professional kitchen, if a pot burns one too many times, you throw it away. At Mosesson, if teachers had discarded every utensil that had been burned one too many times, we’d have had nothing left.
Chef John’s biggest obstacles, however, were his students.
“How do you know if the oil is the right temperature?” a kid named Niklas asked, interrupting Chef John’s lesson on deep-frying. It was a straightforward question, but Niklas was the type of entitled kid who thought he was funnier than he actually was. I could tell by the smirk on his face that he was up to something.
Chef John answered him straight. “There are three ways to tell.One, drop in a couple of test fries. If they float up to the surface and start to bubble, and if you can hear a sizzle, then the oil’s hot.”
“I don’t want to lose a fry,” Niklas moaned dramatically. “I looooove my fries.”
A few scattered snickers rippled through the room.
“The second way is to simply watch the time,” Chef John continued. “If you give it fifteen minutes and then use a thermometer, it should read 360 degrees Fahrenheit.”
Then he turned to Nik, who stood on the other side of the vat of the hot oil. “Of course, you can always put
After a brief demonstration of how to cut a classic batonnet—a squared-off oversize matchstick—a kid named Martin got a turn at the chopping board. The teacher handed over his knife, and Martin said nothing. He just took the knife and, in one fluid motion, topped and tailed the potato, cutting off the rounded ends and edges so that he had a rectangular block. He sliced the block into quarter-inch-thick slabs, then stacked the slabs in piles of three and sliced them again, lengthwise.
The group fell silent, admiring the perfectly uniform pile of potato sticks. Martin took a towel from a peg below the counter and wiped down the knife blade.
“Did everybody see that?” our teacher asked.
My grandmother had been such a thorough and patient teacher that I came into school with basic techniques, far beyond most of the kids in my class. I knew how to hold a knife. I knew how to fillet a fish.I knew how to sauté meat in a cast iron pan over high heat to produce a nice crust. But I could see in that mound of potatoes that Martin knew everything I knew, and more. Cooking was incorporated into his body like pure muscle memory, the same way I dribbled a soccer ball, the way the rest of us walked and breathed. From that day on, as I saw it, there were only two students in the entire school—me and Martin. He was the one to beat and I was the one to do it.
One of our instructors was a young Brit named John Morris. His job was to teach us how to grill, fry, sauté, and poach, all using French techniques and terminology, of course. Unlike most of our other teachers, he insisted we call him Chef John, as if we were in a professional kitchen. Chef John spoke in Swenglish, starting each class in polite Swedish and gradually slipping, as the day ground on, into a string of English curse words. He’d started off in his hometown pub, cleaning chickens and cooking liver. Then he moved to London and worked in the kitchen of the opulent Dorchester hotel, where he was promoted to
chef de partie
and cooked for the likes of Queen Elizabeth and Jimmy Carter. If he hadn’t met a Swedish girl in a bar, he said, he’d still be there. But that girl had become his wife, and love had led him to Gburg.
Chef John did not have an easy task. Try demonstrating the difference between simmering and poaching on an old government-issue stove whose gas line delivered its fuel in uneven hiccups. In a professional kitchen, if a pot burns one too many times, you throw it away. At Mosesson, if teachers had discarded every utensil that had been burned one too many times, we’d have had nothing left.
Chef John’s biggest obstacles, however, were his students.
“How do you know if the oil is the right temperature?” a kid named Niklas asked, interrupting Chef John’s lesson on deep-frying. It was a straightforward question, but Niklas was the type of entitled kid who thought he was funnier than he actually was. I could tell by the smirk on his face that he was up to something.
Chef John answered him straight. “There are three ways to tell.One, drop in a couple of test fries. If they float up to the surface and start to bubble, and if you can hear a sizzle, then the oil’s hot.”
“I don’t want to lose a fry,” Niklas moaned dramatically. “I looooove my fries.”
A few scattered snickers rippled through the room.
“The second way is to simply watch the time,” Chef John continued. “If you give it fifteen minutes and then use a thermometer, it should read 360 degrees Fahrenheit.”
Then he turned to Nik, who stood on the other side of the vat of the hot oil. “Of course, you can always put
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